From the journal:
A military operation carried out at night. I see troops activated. Someone says of Syria's Bashar Assad, "If it had been him, we would have killed him like this". There is a reference to the movie Star Wars, and the bombing run at the end of the movie where each pilot has a single shot at a vulnerable target. My understanding is that these men have a similar mission, to kill Assad.
Before the operation is carried out, I am asked to follow someone to a certain spot in the desert so that I can see something. It is a lion resting in the moonlight, his figure reflected beneath him as if he were resting in a shallow pool of water, but he is lying on sand. There is something symbolic about this but I'm not sure what it means. It is supposed to be "lion in the desert" and "lion by moonlight" or "lion of the desert by moonlight". The image is an arresting one. The lion is a giant specimen, not a normal size by any stretch of the imagination. His scale is more like that of the great sphinx in Egypt, and his pose is similar also. I had the feeling that the lion would be dangerous when awake.
Comment:
I always referred to this dream as the one about "The Syrian Lion" and made an illustration of it dated April 2, 2011, at about the same time as I made several other dream illustrations. At the time of the dream and even as late as when I made the illustration, titled "Syrian lion" (in which I left out the reflection unintentionally), Syria was not in the news that much. That said, five years after the dream but only two weeks before the drawing (a more finished version of an illustration in the original 2006 journal entry), on March 15, 2011, protests against Bashar Al-Assad's government began.
In 2013, Hezbollah entered the war in support of the Syrian army.[78][79] In the east, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), a jihadist militant group which was initially linked to Al-Qaeda in Iraq, made rapid military gains in both Syria and Iraq, eventually conflicting with the other rebels. In July 2014, ISIS controlled a third of Syria's territory and most of its oil and gas production, thus establishing itself as the major opposition force.[80]
The Syrian government is upheld by military support from Russia, which was expanded in the winter of 2013–14,[81] and Iran, while Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and United States transferred weapons to the rebels.
By 2011, ISIL was in control of much of Syria and Iraq and they call themselves "Syrian Lions" and "Lions of Syria", after a speech by Sheikh Ayman Al-Zawahiri on August 20, 2011 which included the following lines:
"As for the third message, it is to our fellow Muslims in Syria:
I salute the lions of Syria and its honorable and free, quoting these stanzas from Ahmad Shawqi:
[Poetry]
I send you peace that is softer than a breeze *** And not enough tears, O Damascus
The excuses of the cowards and the talkers *** This is an indescribable big affliction
Those killed give life to others *** And those captured sacrifice for and redeem others
Freedom has a red door *** On which every bloodied hand is knocking
I call upon our people in Sham, the land of Ribat and Jihad, to continue their resistance and defense against this unjust, oppressive, and arrogant regime that kills its people and that flees from its own land, the regime which has fled from the Golan, carrying out massacres from Hama to Daraa.
O lions of the Sham! Continue your march, revolution and uprising against this regime which participates with America in its war against Islam in the name of terrorism, so that it remains silent about shedding your blood and plundering your resources. Do not be fooled by the wavering statements of America about your uprising. America is the one that handed over your brothers to that tyrannical, violent, and corrupting regime to torture and punish them.
Patience, O lions of the Sham! The land has begun to tremble under the feet of these titanic Tawagheet. Have Patience, our Ummah everywhere! America has gone through four disasters in the past ten years, beginning with the attacks of New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, then its defeat in Iraq, and here it is being defeated in Afghanistan. And the fourth: The commencement of the fall of its proxies like the dry leaves of autumn in Tunisia and Egypt, and tomorrow in Libya, Yemen, Syria, and the Arabian Peninsula."
Al-Zawaharie’s statements link Al-Queada with an effort to overthrow the Syrian regime and the concept of “Syrian lions”.